Archive for the ‘Workshop’ Category

Busy with Business

Sunday, May 19th, 2013

Wow, two anthology posts in a row! I’ve never done that before. I’ve been kind of busy, doing some cool things.

Early in May I attended a workshop on how to do POD books — covers, interiors, marketing and selling, with a lot of really shocking info on how the business has changed very recently. I spent the time between my April anthology post and the workshop itself fiddling with Photoshop Elements (which it turned out I didn’t need for the class :P ) and InDesign, which is an awesome tool — once you’ve learned even the basics of ID, it becomes clear why it’s the industry standard. Once you have your art (for about fifteen dollars off a stock art site — and yes, they have art art as well as photos) you can do the whole cover, beautifully, in InDesign.

Flowing the text in is easy. Front matter goes in first, then your story or novel text; ID will create as many pages as you need, and you use master pages to set the layout. The fiddly part here is making sure the formatting works at the line- and paragraph-level. Hunting for widows (the first line of a paragraph alone at the bottom of a page), orphans (the last line of a paragraph alone at the top of a page, and widowed orphans (the last line of a paragraph, totally alone at the top of a page, with no other text on the page) can make your interior look much better. Most of these can be fixed easily by using the tracking tool on a whole paragraph at once, tightening or loosening it enough to pull a lone word or two up onto the previous line (re-flowing everything up to close the space) or to push a word or two onto the next line (pushing everything down a line) while not changing the spacing so much that someone casually reading will even notice.

InDesign is an incredibly powerful tool, and there are usually multiple ways of doing just about anything, which means it can be overwhelming at first. Having personal classroom instruction, one-to-three instruction with Allyson in small groups, and people coming around to give us one-to-one help during lab periods, was worth the cost of the workshop, and then some. The workshop was taught by Dean Wesley Smith and Allyson Longueira (Allyson is the publisher at WMG), with help during labs by a couple of local writers who are old hands at this and came to help out. Lee Allred was particularly awesome in giving assistance to all of us newbie book designers.

And really, that’s what it comes down to: the design. You can achieve the same results with other tools, but what’s important is the design. Look at other books in your genre — professionally published books, not just indie books — and see what they look like. What elements are on the cover? How are they laid out? What’s large or small? What elements are associated together, and placed near one another? Notice those little tags — “Bestselling author of Popular Book,” or “Book 3 of Author’s Cool Series” — that are too small to read in thumbnail? You still need them on your e-books. Even if they’re unreadable in an online bookseller’s catalog, they’re design elements and readers are used to seeing them, even as a little line of unreadable text, on professionally designed covers. The cover will look naked and unfinished without them.

What’s included in the front matter, and how is it laid out? What do new chapter pages look like in a novel, or new story pages in a collection or anthology? What does the spacing look like, between the headers and the text, the footers and the text, the text and the margins? If your presentation is amateurish, potential readers (buyers) will notice, even if they can’t articulate what bugs them about a particular cover or interior. New York has conditioned us to expect certain things about a professional book, and if an indie book doesn’t have all those things, or they’re not laid out the way we’re used to seeing, that’ll ping our “amateur” alarm, even if we can’t put our finger on why. Learning how to design the book, and the cover, is more important than learning to use kerning tools or feathered gradients in a particular software package. (Although you really should learn those things in whatever software you’re using.)

So before the workshop, I was playing with the software and watching instructional videos online. Then I was in Oregon for a week and a half, and a lot busier than I thought I’d be. The day I flew to Portland, I met a writer friend [waves to PD Singer] at the airport, along with a friend of hers who lives in Portland, and we went and had lunch with a few other writers in our genre who are local to Portland. I love meeting internet people in realspace, so that was very cool. After lunch, Pam and I drove out to the coast, and we roomed together for the workshop itself. We sat next to each other in class, swapping help and opinions and angst. :)

After the workshop, we drove back to Portland and Pam dropped me off at my hotel. When I’m at these workshops, I like staying an extra night in Portland; not having to scramble to catch a plane that day means that I can flex my schedule to match that of whoever’s driving me. One of the writers we had lunch with on the way out came to my hotel that evening. [waves to Amelia Gormley.] We chatted, had dinner together, and chatted some more.

The biggest bomb dropped on the workshop, though, was during the evening sessions, which were all business discussions. Remember Ella Distribution? I mentioned them a couple of months ago — they were set up to distribute indie books by small publishers to bookstores. Well, Ella is gone. It was well organized, with an awesome web site, and had great people working on it, but within less than half a year, the industry changed. Now, not only is Ella no longer necessary, but it can’t compete with the big kids on the playground.

Dean and Sheldon McArthur (Shelly’s one of the best known booksellers in the country) talked to us about what’d changed recently with the distributors. Basically, 1) Baker and Taylor no longer marks books as POD published, and Ingram and the others followed suit; 2) B&T (and the others) now offer POD books at a good discount to booksellers, about 45%, and more if they keep on top of their bills; and 3) B&T (and the others) now allow returns on POD books.

There are indie-pubbed books in bookstores right now. If you go through Createspace, and pay the extra $25 for extended distribution, your books are available to bookstores through their standard distributors, on terms that make stocking them attractive. The only barrier right now is your book’s presentation — mainly cover and summary blurb. (Again, does your cover look professional, or does it look amateur?)

The playing field between an indie-pubbed book and a midlist New York published book is now level when it comes to getting into bookstores.

Shelly talked about how he finds books to buy for his store, through the distributor, through publisher catalogs and promotional material, and through sites like Goodreads, where he’ll go to see what books people might be talking about that he hadn’t heard of. He’s been buying indie books ever since the distributors changed their policies. He doesn’t care where a book comes from so long as it’s a good book, professionally presented, and neither do the readers.

Dean and Kristine Kathryn Rusch are talking about this all month on their blogs, in much more detail. As always, there’s good stuff in the comments, too. I highly recommend you read their posts on the subject. (Actually, if you’re a writer I highly recommend you read their blogs all the time. Lots of great stuff there.)

During all this, I had a deadline on the 15th to get a story turned in for an event running in June on Goodreads, and the story I was writing was getting longer and longer and longer…. [headdesk] When I wasn’t futzing with InDesign during the workshop, I was writing, and after I came home I was still writing. I got it done, a 60K word novel that’ll be available on Goodreads some time in June, and as an e-book on Goodreads and ARe some time after that, depending on where it is in the very long list of books the group’s volunteers have to work on. I’ll be doing a paperback version some time after that. (I did a cover for it at the workshop.)

And now I’m back to writing other things.

The business is changing while we sit here. If we stay on top of the changes, and take advantage of them, they’ll work for us. This is a great time to be a writer, and a wonderful time to be indie publishing, or getting into it if you’re not yet.

Angie

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February Stuff

Monday, March 4th, 2013

I’ve been on the Oregon coast for the last week and a half, doing two workshops back-to-back. It was a grueling experience, as the single workshop I did last year was. And it was awesome, and I’ll definitely be doing it again. I got lots of writing done, and I SOLD A STORY!! Which got the all-caps treatment because it’s my first professional sale, as in more than five cents per word, holy freaking yay!!! :D

I’m going to have a story in Fiction River’s anthology How to Save the World, edited by John Helfers. (Scroll down a bit — it’s the second book.) Holy sheep, I’m gonna be in a book with David Gerrold!

I’ve been trying to break into mainstream SF/F for ages, so this is a huge deal for me. I’m still getting this really silly grin on my face whenever I think about it, so I beg pardon of anyone who sees me and thinks o_O about my state of mind. :)

I wrote almost 29K words in February, which is good — I’m still well ahead of quota for making my 2013 goal. My wordcount meter says I’m at 27%, so I’m where I was hoping to be at about a week into April. That’s great; I love having padding on my quota. I was hoping for more in February (January was over 35K) but there were several days when I was in the workshop and frantically reading rather than writing. I count those days well spent, though. I also killed my streak, but I was anticipating that, too. No prob; doing an Oregon workshop is one of the better reasons I can think of for having days with no actual writing.

The workshops I did were The Business and Craft of Short Fiction, and the Anthology Workshop. The Antho Workshop is a repeat for me; it’s worth doing over and over, and many writers do. I took a ton of notes, especially at the first one, and learned a lot of stuff I didn’t know before, which is the point. (Wow, a story that’s in a continually extended option with Hollywood can make you a buttload of money, even if they never make the movie!) Great info; it’s going to take a while to absorb it all.

Currently I’m sitting in a hotel room in Portland; I have a flight home at 2:30. I’ll do some writing today, then fall into bed (ten hours last night, still not caught up) and my next Thing To Go To is a dentist’s appointment on Thursday.

Oh, yeah, didn’t blog about that before. :/ So on Wednesday two weeks ago, Jim and I were having dinner at this little cafe across the street. They have these really good ice cream sandwiches — two chocolate chip cookies, made in-house, with in-house ice cream in the middle, then freeze the whole thing. So I was eating my ice cream sandwich when one of my crowns (upper incisor) snapped off at the gum line. :( Luckily I had a root canal before they put the crown on, so it didn’t hurt; I was just damn startled, and then all ACK!! when I realized what’d happened. And that I was getting on a plane Saturday morning to go to the workshops. [headdesk]

I went to my dentist the next morning and they put in a very fragile, non-functional, temporary tooth-like object, cemented to the teeth to either side on the back. I was warned not to bite anything, and not even to brush. And when your dentist tells you not to brush, you know your fragile dental work is FRAGILE. I was very careful, but it was a bit wiggly within about 24 hours. I had some vague hope that it’d last at least until the second workshop, but no luck; it came out just a bit over three days after having been installed. So I’ve been going just over a week now with this huge gap in my front teeth, and talking a little funny.

I feel like I’m seven again. :P

Anyway, this is fixable, although it’s going to be expensive. Civil Service has notoriously lousy dental insurance, and the Pacific Northwest has notoriously expensive dental care, for whatever reason. So the bill for an implant is going to be very large, and our insurance isn’t picking up a dollar of it. This is our tentatively planned cruise for this year, going into my mouth.

I just hope my other crowns last longer. At least I know to stay away from the Market Cafe’s ice cream sandwiches; that was the most expensive dessert I’ve ever eaten, by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Angie

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February Stuff

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Writing: 13,508 = 5 pts.
Editing: 26,488 = 5 pts.
Beta: 1 novel = 1 pt.
TOTAL: 11 pts.

Koala Challenge 9

I spent most of a week out on the Oregon coast at a writing workshop. Came home physically exhausted and mentally buzzing, because as dead as I was at the end, this was an awesome experience. If you ever have a chance to take one of Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s workshops, do it — they rock.

Angie

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January Stuff

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Writing

Writing — 6717 words = 2 pts.
Editing — 12,995 words = 2 pts.
Submissions — 3 = 3 pts.
Betaed Novel for Friend — 1 = 1 pt.
TOTAL = 8 pts.

Koala 8

The writing total is pitiful, especially considering how I did October through December. In my own defense, I’ll say that I had TWO laptops in a row get borked out from under me. The first one’s still a doorstop and the second one was only fixed (sort of — it was fixed by turning off the TAP function on the touchpad completely) a few days before the end of the month. Still sucks.

The good news is that the time I spent not writing I spent (among other things) thinking about how the book was going, and I realized that approaching the ending action realistically wasn’t working for me. :P I’m usually all about doing things right, but there’s a volcano involved [cough] and the idea that the boys could just sort of magic an about-to-erupt volcano back into stable peace and quiet was pretty boggling. I’ve done some volcano research for this storyline, and I decided that they were able to prevent things from getting any further, but so far as it’d been stirred up already, it still was, and things were going to proceed apace, with tremors and news bulletins and alerts and some eventual lahars hitting a few small communities. Which is what would happen if Mt. Rainier had a significant but not catastrophic (that is, far short of Mount St. Helens) eruption event. Everyone around here has volcano insurance, and there are signs posted in dangerous areas pointing out volcano escape routes to take in case you have to evacuate; there’s plenty of info on what’d likely happen and what people would do.

The problem is that this doesn’t happen all at once, boom, like someone setting off a bomb. I had some other loose ends to clean up, and I did that, while the characters kept an eye and an ear on the volcano news on TV. But still, the wrap on the characters’ active participation in the eruption was the action climax of the book, and I had several chapters written after that, with at least one or two more to go. All of that was, literally, anti-climax from the POV of the built up action/danger thread of the story, and the longer it got, the more draggy it felt. I could just see readers getting bored and impatient.

So I ripped out almost 10K words and decided to handle it differently. They needed to really wrap up the volcano problem right there, and I came up with a way to get it done without giving the characters a ridiculously huge amount of power. Now I still need to wrap up those other threads ASAP, but at least the volcano thing isn’t draaaaaagging out like it was. Once I’ve written to the end, I need to go back and tweak a couple of things I’ve thought of as I’ve progressed, but that shouldn’t take incredibly long. Then it’s into submission and back to work on the next book, the one I did 50K of for NaNo.

Workshop

I also have to write a short story for my upcoming Anthology Workshop; the assignment for that is due any time now, and I’m looking forward to getting it. This should be fun. :)

I’m doing one of the workshops Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch put on each year, and I’m pretty excited about it. It runs in early March, and I’ll definitely be blogging about it when I get home. For the anthology workshop, we get a theme assignment in advance (like RSN) and we submit a story for it, as if we were submitting to an antho. When we get to the workshop, several professional anthology editors will tell us whether they’d have bought our story and exactly why or why not. We also have an option to write another story and submit it while at the workshop, and get feedback on that one as well.

This kind of info should be gold, seriously. I’ve been getting a lot of “Good story, well written, not buying it, enjoyed reading it, looking forward to seeing more from you” type rejections in the last year or two, and while they’re an order of magnitude better than the “Thank you for thinking of us but this doesn’t meet our needs” type, it’s still frustrating. I feel like I’m standing right on the threshold, and there’s some key thing I’m missing that’s preventing me from stepping over. I’m hoping to get the information I need to take that step when I do the workshop.

Anthology Listings

Thanks to everyone who answered my questions about “Until Filled” anthologies. Taking feedback from folks in the three places I posted that query, I’ve decided that what I’m going to do is include all the Until Filled anthos in the next posting, in just over a week, with notations showing how long each one has been open (or how long I’ve been aware of it — close enough) and which ones are being dropped. Anyone still interested can bookmark the page the antho call is on, but after this month I’m dropping anything that’s been hanging open with no progress posts from the editor in a year or more. That means no update posts, no update edits on the original post, no replies to comments on the original post, for a year. I think that’s more than reasonable, and feedback indicated that most folks who’d sub to an Until Filled antho at all were less likely to sub to one that’d been hanging for a long time. So one more month to let people bookmark what they want, and then I’m going to prune the listings.

If you’re an editor of an Until Filled anthology and I drop your listing because I missed an update post or something similar, feel free to e-mail me at angiebenedetti AT gmail DOT com with a link to your update. As always, final decisions about what to include on the listing are mine, but if I’ve missed something, I want to know about it. (And note that I always check the Until Filled posts when I’m prepping a new post — if there’s no link to your update on that original post, or if it’s buried somewhere hard to spot, maybe that’s a problem. If you want submissions, especially on older projects, make it easy for writers to find your updates.)

Angie

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I’m Back! WorldCon Part 1

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

WorldCon in Reno was a lot of fun, and one of the best run conventions I’ve attended. I’ve worked almost 50 conventions and conferences, so I can often spot problems from the front of the house. I didn’t spot anything here; even the Masquerade and Hugo Ceremony both started within a few minutes of their scheduled times, which is pretty amazing. :) I got to hang with friends, went to more panels than I usually go to in half a dozen conventions, and generally had a great time.

Jim and I flew in on Tuesday, got our badges, and had the evening free to relax and check out the program schedule before things officially started on Wednesday. We stayed at the Atlantis, the main convention hotel, which is attached to the convention center with a (very very) long skyway. It was quite a hike from our room to the panels and such at the CC, but I was happy not to have to walk outside, where the temperatures were distinctly uncomfortable, especially for someone who’s become acclimated to Seattle weather. Although in contrast with the heat outside, looking out the skyway windows we could see the hills above Reno, and one of them still had snow on it. O_O Wow. Reno itself is about four thousand feet up, so the top of that hill (which is probably a mountain, officially) is probably a mile up or close to it; that must be why the shaded slopes were still snowy. Still, it’s an odd sight in the northern hemisphere in August, especially when one is wishing for more AC.

The first panel I attended was the most useful — Mary Robinette Kowal, who’s a puppeteer and voice actor as well as a writer, did a panel called “Giving an Effective Reading.” It was opposite the Opening Ceremony, but it was a wonderful panel and I’m very glad I went. I thought I had a general idea of reading aloud — I’d done it in school, after all, as I’m sure everyone has — but I was still nervous about my ability to read my own work in front of an audience.

She started with story selection, looking at things like the number of characters, the way the language lends itself to interpretive reading, and making sure your selection is a complete whole, even if it’s a chunk of some larger story. When she got into using the voice like an instrument, Ms. Kowal had us go through a number of exercises, demonstrating different aspects of voice, including things I’d never heard of or thought about, like the placement of your voice — which part of your mouth resonates when you’re speaking. This was very ?? when she first described it, but the results were cool.

The panel was less than an hour long so she sort of rushed through a number of topics, but she has a great collection of posts on reading aloud on her blog. Highly recommended for any writer who might want to read their work to an audience. Hint: Don’t wait till the night before to click through the link. :)

That’s a good wrap for now — more next time. [wave]

Angie

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Workshop — Queues

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I was replying to a comment by Charles on my last post (about the Critique Circle workshop site) and mentioned the queue system. I got into explaining how it all works, but thought others might be interested too.

Stories or chapters you want critiqued get posted to a queue. Each queue is a list of pieces up for critique. How many pieces get put into the new week’s “current” queue depends on a formula based on how many pieces are waiting and how many critiques that queue got last week; the idea is to keep things balanced so pieces move up reasonably fast, but without flooding the current queue so much that the number of critiques per story goes way down.

There are current queues (the pieces up for critique this week) which show when you go right to the queue page; upcoming queues, which is the list of pieces waiting to move into a future current queue; and older queues, which are the archives. The set of public queues include the Newbie Queue, where every new person has to post their first story or chapter, plus a list of genre queues — General, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Women’s/Romance/Chick-Lit, Children’s/YA, Mystery/Suspense/Horror and Erotica.

If you post one of your stories to a queue, the soonest it’ll come up is the next critiquing week, and it might take two or three. You can help it along by doing more critiques on the current stories in that queue, nudging the formula to let more stories out next week, giving yours a better shot at moving up. Your story in particular doesn’t move because you’re critiquing personally, but anyone doing a lot of critiques will make more slots in that queue available next week.

You can also spend more credits (which you accumulate by critiquing) to move your story up, but it takes quite a lot. I was reading the forum and people were talking about spending like 15 or 18 credits to bump their story up to the top of the list, when it only costs 3 to dump it in at the end of the list. I haven’t seen anyone complaining that people who bump their stories are keeping others from progressing normally, though, so I guess they have some sort of mechanism to prevent that.

There are also private queues, which are owned by individuals and are invite-only. A private queue can either let only the owner post and invited members critique, or it can let every member both post and critique. This lets people set up a chosen group of friends to critique their novel or whatever, or a smaller closed workshop group. Members of a private queue can also post to and critique on the public queues, and you can be a member of as many private queues as you want.

I’m probably missing some subtleties or refinements, but I’m pretty sure this is the basics. :)

Angie

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Workshop

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I’ve been missing critiquing recently, so when Stacia Kane mentioned a couple of sites online the other day — one a service to help find crit partners and the other an actual workshop — I checked them out and ended up joining Critique Circle.

It’s only been about a day and a half since I joined, but so far it’s working out well.

The one thing I really liked when I was checking it out was the way it’s organized. You submit a story or a novel chapter to a queue to be critiqued, and a set of stories and chapters becomes available in each queue to be critiqued for a week as currently up for review. (There are also archives where you can choose to critique an older story, or just read to catch up if there’s an interesting Chapter 5 up in the current queue.) You look through what’s up, pick one and write a critique.

There’s no obligation to critique certain stories, or certain people’s stories (although as I look around, there does seem to be some social expectation to give a critique to someone who’s critiqued you, but it’s not a requirement); you can do however many of whichever stories grab you. I’ve always had a hard time in workshops where you’re grouped with four or five people and everyone in the group critiques everyone else’s stories. Inevitably there are stories I’m just not into, and I’m not enthusiastic enough about the some aspect to really enjoy putting three or four or eight hours into dissecting it and making notes on all the parts. Or someone in the group is just not a great writer, but gets offended at criticism, etc. I like being able to choose what I critique. That’s how the RomEx workshop back on GEnie worked, and it was excellent; it’s sort of been my gold standard for workshops ever since, and Critique Circle seems to be hitting it.

I’ve done one critique so far for CC (although it hasn’t been released yet — newbies’ first critiques have to be reviewed by a staffer, which makes sense) and it came out at a little over 7K words, for a story (actually half a story) a little over 3K words. That’s always been fairly standard for me, unless I’m critiquing one of those rare writers whose manuscript is just that clean, which has only happened once or twice. I did an inline critique, where you leave comments under specific paragraphs so it’s very clear to the writer exactly what bit you’re talking about; there are also blocks before and after the story for leaving more general comments. I started the critique in the afternoon, left off when my husband came home (leaving the critique screen up on my computer), then finished the next day. The system logged me off at some point while I was AFK, and when I sat down again and started working, I got a message that the auto-save (which kicks in like every minute) had failed and that I needed to log in. It did not blank the screen, take me to a log-in window, or lose the typing I’d done in the previous minute; I was able to open a new window, log in there, then go back to the critique window and keep working. This is a brilliant system and every site where you have to be logged in to do any kind of work (even if it’s just typing a forum post) should work this way.

CC works on a credit system, where you need a certain number of earned credits (although they start you out with two when you join) to post a story or chapter, and you earn credits by critiquing. Depending on the length of the story you critique and the length of your critique, you can earn between .5 and 1.5 credits for a critique. It takes three credits to post, and more to post another if you already have one in the queue, so the system requires people to critique more than they post. As it works out, looking at the older queues, stories seem to get an average of about half a dozen critiques each, which is pretty awesome. I’ve seen a few that only got two or three (which would still be pretty good for most workshops, not counting the you-WILL-critique-everyone groups; I’ve been in some that only promised one, and sometimes only delivered one) and quite a few have gotten ten or more.

I have to say, though, that most of the critiques are incredibly short. I’ve browsed through some of the archives and for the most part the comments are specific and useful, but still, the average critique length seems to be about four or five hundred words, which…. Well, yeah. Still, if you get six or eight of them, that adds up to quite a lot of feedback.

One thing I’m not crazy about is that the site uses a wierd, square-bracket-based markup system I’ve only seen on one other forum. I’ve gotten used to it for forum posts, but in order to take full advantage of the site features (like getting in-line comments on your story) you need to use this system for your posted stories too. :/ I posted the first chapter of my urban fantasy novel to the workshop yesterday and went through changing the italic text to use [i]italic[/i] markup. There were only a few instances so it wasn’t unbearably annoying, but not for the first time I’m wondering who came up with this system and why they decided they just had to invent something different when HTML is around and most people online know at least the simplest basics, like italics. [sigh] And for a serious writing workshop, editors don’t want the HTML either, much less some odd forum system, so even if they didn’t make you learn something new, you’d still have to go in and change all your mark-ups to post. I’m hoping there’s actually a technical reason why we can’t paste text with inherent italics in, because it’s definitely inconvenient to have to convert everything for posting. Ideally, the workshop should accept the format that editors want to see too, so manuscripts files can go straight back and forth.

There are some neat side features on the site too, though, like a tracking system for your submissions (to markets, not the workshop), a name generator, a reminder system that lets you set up alerts for whatever you want, and a manuscript progress tool, among others. I haven’t tried any of them yet, but it’s cool that the site has a lot of little extras like that; it’ll be fun to poke around and see what’s here and how things work.

At this point I’m generally happy with the site. Everyone I’ve interacted with has been very friendly and helpful. This feels like a good place and I’m looking forward to being here for a long while.

Angie

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